Month: March 2023

Amid growing logistics and supply-chain business, global logistic giant Kintetsu World Express Inc (KWE) has formally started its operations in Bangladesh.

A function marking the KWE's direct operations in Bangladesh was held at a hotel in Dhaka on Tuesday night.

Japanese Ambassador to Bangladesh Iwama Kiminori, KWE Regional Managing Director (South-East Asia and Oceania Region) Yasuyuki Tani and KWE Managing Director (Bangladesh operations) Vibhu Prakash, among others, joined the function as the chief guest.

In April 2010, KWE opened a representative office in Dhaka to continue their activities in South Asia.

Transportation demand in the region is growing remarkably and KWE has been providing international transportation services through partner agents, mainly for its Japanese customers.

A number of Western and Japanese apparel manufacturers have already established operations in the country, and further growth in transport demand is expected in the future due to the growth of consumer markets, changes in supply chains and diversification of industrial structures within Asia, KWE said.

With the establishment of this new subsidiary, KWE will intensify its sales and marketing activities and enhance its transport services to meet the business needs of all their customers in the region.

The KWE Group is committed to providing flexible services and expanding its network throughout Southeast Asia, including Bangladesh, to meet the needs of our customers.

KWE Regional Managing Director Yasuyuki Tani told the media that they understand Bangladesh is becoming one of the top emerging markets and as an important player in the global freight forwarding and supply chain business.

“We think that we have to include this country in our business network,” he said.

Founded in 1970 and headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, the KWE has presence in more than 45 countries, 304 cities and 685 locations worldwide with approximately 18,000-plus employees.

Source: United News of Bangladesh

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has requested the deputy commissioners to take immediate steps to stop operation of illegal brick kilns to prevent air pollution in the country.

A letter from Environment Pollution Control Wing-1 of the Ministry was sent to the DCs in this regard on Wednesday and requested them to inform the ministry by taking necessary measures in this regard.

The letter asked the DCs to close all illegal brick kilns in the country, especially the more harmful ones on priority basis, said the ministry.

DCs have been asked to strengthen enforcement activities against new brick kilns constructed without any licence.

The deputy commissioners of those districts where the number of illegal brick kilns are more than the legal ones have been asked to inform the ministry after conducting special drives.

In another letter issued today, DCs have been requested to take measures to stop the use of dingle-use or disposable plastic products in all government offices in the district, including the deputy commissioner's office, and in coastal areas.

To prevent plastic and polythene pollution, DCs have been requested to organise monthly meetings and regular discussion meetings with stakeholders and to launch public awareness programmes .

Source: United News of Bangladesh

Bangladesh received inward remittance of $1.56 billion in February, which was $1.95 billion in January.

Though the inward remittance flow decreased in February compared to January, the overall remittance flow rose in the first eight months of the current fiscal year.

According to Bangladesh Bank (BB) in the first eight months Bangladesh received $14.01 billion in remittance, which is $574.86 million more than the same period of last fiscal year. In FY 2021-22, Bangladesh received $13.43 billion in remittances in the first eight months.

The foreign exchange markets of Bangladesh are being stable thanks to remittance inflow, and the forex reserves of Bangladesh bank stood at $32.3 billion on March 1, 2023.

The expatriates, freelancers, and skilled professionals of Bangladeshi have contributed to the country by earning foreign exchange while the central bank struggling with LC liabilities to import essential commodities and industrial raw materials, the sector insiders say.

Bank officials said many import payments are being deferred due to the dollar crisis. For this, dollars coming from expatriates are being bought at a higher price than the fixed rate.

As a result, expatriate income increased. If the price limit of the dollar is removed, the crisis will go away, they say.

Bangladesh Bank spokesperson Mesbaul Haque told UNB that in order to increase remittance inflow, the central bank has increased the exchange rate of US dollars for remittance.

In addition to a 2.5 percent hassle-free incentive for remittance, several banks also provide additional incentives to attract foreign exchange, he said.

Banks will not cut any charge or fee for sending remittances through legal channels, he said.

Bangladesh Bank says that more than 40 percent of remittance of expatriate income is sent to the country through hundi.

Source: United News of Bangladesh

Bidyanondo Foundation has launched a project called “Rickshaw Bin” where rickshaw pullers will be paid for depositing plastic waste.

Initially, 200 rickshaw pullers will be brought under the project, according to a Facebook post on the foundation’s page on Wednesday.

“He is depositing the plastic waste from the rickshaw bin in a bhangari(scrap materials) store and getting money in return. Maybe a little but for the poor in this market, Tk 1 is equal to a lakh taka,” said the organization posting some photos on its page.

“It is the inborn nature of people to find mistakes in every work. The 'Rickshaw Bin' project is no exception. How will a good thought come if you think that it will be used for bad work?” the post reads.

“For now, we are bringing 200 rickshaws under this project. We need cooperation from all to do the rest,” it added.

Earlier, Bidyanondo Foundation opened a “Plastic Exchange Store” to clean up St Martin’s Island and to rid it of the plastic waste menace.

Through the store, Bidyanondo is offering rice, pulses and other essential items in exchange of plastic waste on St Martin’s Island.

Plastic is choking Bangladesh's drains, canals, and rivers. Around 1,700 tonnes of plastic waste is produced in the country every day and only half of it is recycled, according to the Department of Environment.

In Dhaka city alone, plastic waste has gone up more than 3.5 times from 178 tonnes per day in 2005 to 646 tonnes per day in 2020. Of that 646 tonnes, only 37 per cent is recycled, and mostly by the informal sector, according to the World Bank.

Source: United News of Bangladesh

The National Committee to Protect Shipping, Roads and Railways has urged the authorities concerned to take advance precautionary measures for transport management during Eid to avoid possible accidents and public sufferings.

The civic organization has demanded that the authorities to repair dilapidated roads and run essential number of BRTC buses to solve the public transport crisis.

Ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, president of the organisation Mohammad Shahid Mia and its general secretary Ashis Kumar Dey made the demands in a statement on Wednesday.

The statement also sought steps to stop plying of all types of small vehicles, including motorcycle and three wheelers with locally made engines on all national highways for 10 days before and after Eid.

Expressing deep concern over the uphill road crashes and loss of lives, the statement said that if strict action is not be taken in this regard immediately, the number of accidents may reach an unbearable level during Eid travel.

In the statement, the NCPSRR leaders said that many roads in the country are in poor condition. Renovation of these roads usually starts hastily before Eid and so the work is not done properly, it said.

As a result, public money is wasted and risk of accidents remains, it added.

The leaders of the organization alleged that a huge number of home-bound people had to face severe shortage of transports and bus owners increase the fare. .

The bus workers on midway forcefully collect double or triple money more than the fixed fare from those passengers, the statement alleged.

Due to schedule disruptions of most of the bus services in every Eid, many passengers endure extreme suffering, added the statement.

The leaders of the National Committee demanded that BRTC Eid Special Bus Service be launched in special arrangements on all long-distance routes from major cities including Dhaka to alleviate the acute transport crisis and fare anarchy.

Source: United News of Bangladesh

The man credited with inventing the cellphone 50 years ago had only one concern then about the brick-sized device with a long antenna: Would it work?

These days Martin Cooper frets like everybody else about his invention’s impacts on society — from the loss of privacy to the risk of internet addiction to the rapid spread of harmful content, especially among kids.

“My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” said Cooper, who spoke with The Associated Press at the telecom industry’s biggest trade show in Barcelona, where he was receiving a lifetime award.

Yet the 94-year-old self-described dreamer also marvels at how far cellphone design and capabilities have advanced, and he believes the technology’s best days may still be ahead of it in areas such as education and health care.

“Between the cellphone and medical technology and the Internet, we are going to conquer disease,” he said Monday at MWC, or Mobile World Congress.

Cooper, whose invention was inspired by Dick Tracy's radio wristwatch, said he also envisions a future in which cellphones are charged by human bodies.

It’s a long way from where he started.

Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a New York City street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype that his team at Motorola had started designing only five months earlier.

To needle the competition, Cooper used the Dyna-TAC prototype — which weighed 2.5 pounds and was 11 inches long — to call to his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T.

“The only thing that I was worried about: ‘Is this thing going to work?’ And it did,” he said.

The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution, but looking back on that day Cooper acknowledges, “we had no way of knowing this was the historic moment.”

He spent the better part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market, helping to launch the wireless communications industry and, with it, a global revolution in how we communicate, shop and learn about the world.

Still, Cooper said he’s “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. He thinks phones will evolve so that they will be “distributed on your body,” perhaps as sensors “measuring your health at all times.”

Batteries could even be replaced by human energy.

“You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?” he imagined.

While he dreams about what the future might look like, Cooper is attuned to the industry's current challenges, particularly around privacy.

In Europe, where there are strict data privacy rules, regulators are concerned about apps and digital ads that track user activity, allowing technology and other companies to build up rich profiles of users.

“It’s going to get resolved, but not easily,” Cooper said. “There are people now that can justify measuring where you are, where you’re making your phone calls, who you’re calling, what you access on the Internet.”

Smartphone use by children is another area that needs limits, Cooper said. One idea is to have “various internets curated for different audiences.”

Five-year-olds should be able to use the internet to help them learn, but “we don’t want them to have access to pornography and to things that they don’t understand,” he said.

As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments.

However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”

Source: United News of Bangladesh

The new ticketing system for inter-city rail services has started today (March 01, 2023) from Dhaka’s Kamalapur Railway Station.

“We introduced the new ticketing system for passengers to address complaints regarding ticketing,” Railway Minister Md Nurul Islam Sujan said.

He said this while handing over POS (point of sale) machines that will facilitate collecting fares through national identity (NID) card verification.

“We took this initiative to stop black marketing, and to enable customers to purchase tickets without any complication,” he said.

This new system will also enable commuters to cancel their purchase without coming to the station. Commuters will be able to cancel a purchase online from now on.

The minister also said they will introduce more facilities gradually.

“Passengers won’t be allowed to purchase tickets without registering,” he added.

The new ticketing system will be introduced in local trains gradually. Through this, legal steps will be taken against those who travel using another person’s ticket, he said, adding that the government can collect the fare directly.

A total of 100 POS machines were handed over today.

Source: United News of Bangladesh